re: Texags in the early stages of grief...

A lot of actually factually incorrect (as in not even my opinion) things in those threads said in the same breath as calling us dumb. Whatever. frick em.

8-0

Wtf is wrong with you? LSU is not caught flatfooted by keeping our OC and sending A&M packing.

A&M spends ridiculous and stupid money on Jimbo and LSU blows up his plan of hiring Aranda. For 700k a year, LSU shot Jimbo and A&M down.

Negotiations for top college coaches is common and LSU kept him home. That is not flat footed. That is being responsible.

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Their best part of football is the off season. They just enjoy the hope

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Like us concerning the SEC West and beating BAMA!..............

They are a bunch of dipshits...no doubt....

But when the smoke was there you had our own fans saying he wasn't worth it, to let him leave.

The O fans basically did the same thing.

In that “Dodged a Bullet” thread, there seems to be an awful lot of homophobia coming from a fan base that doesn’t have cheerleaders and opts for 5 guys prancing around in white jumpers.

But I digress.

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Wtf is wrong with you? LSU is not caught flatfooted by keeping our OC and sending A&M packing. A&M spends ridiculous and stupid money on Jimbo and LSU blows up his plan of hiring Aranda. For 700k a year, LSU shot Jimbo and A&M down. Negotiations for top college coaches is common and LSU kept him home. That is not flat footed. That is being responsible.

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There's absolutely nothing wrong with me. I'm not sure why people are fixating on what the correct definition of "flat-footed" means. I defined it in a post up in the thread.

Stopping A&M from crippling our program is not a victory for Alleva. The fact that we were vulnerable like that in the first place is evidence of his mismanagement.

My main point in this thread is to illustrate how effectively A&M handled it's DC hiring process and say that LSU should learn from that. A&M identified about 6 guys as elite targets. Landing any one of them would be "success." Landing Aranda had the benefit of landing, in my opinion, the best DC in the game in addition to crippling one of its hated rivals which it hadn't beaten in 7 years. If the AD had pulled this off, he would have been an absolute hero to A&M fans. However, he also wasn't going to overbid (under his budget constrictions) so there was a ceiling. He did the next best thing - he made a serious play for Aranda (a guy they probably thought they had less than a 20% chance of landing) and forced LSU to pony up $700K/yr (the additional cost equaling that of an above-average coordinator) to keep him. LSU should not have put themselves in such a situation - becoming uniquely dependent on maintaining a DC for its long-term success. They were only in that situation because of how poorly Alleva and the administration handled the HC hire.

Now let's recall how Alleva handled hiring his HC. He made two clumsy attempts at hiring two of the best names in the business after publicly declaring "I am the search." After being rebuffed on his initial offer, he prematurely ended negotiations and settled on promoting his DL coach, who he could have hired at any point because no one else was offering him a HC job. Recognizing how weak the hire was, the new HC coach and the administration assured the fan base that they would ensure they secured the best coordinators money could buy.

It is relevant to consider these two examples - one of a poorly executed negotiation (LSU's HC hire), and one of a brilliantly executed negotiation (A&M's recent DC hire) because LSU is currently negotiating for a new OC.

Again, we have been promised elite coordinators. Again, we've only heard really three names mentioned on these boards - Briles (hot name), Freeze (hot name, pardon the irony), and Ensminger (current LSU position coach). We also are now reading leaked information that LSU will likely hire neither Briles nor Freeze and there are sports commentators connected to the program speculating, well, I guess it will be Ensminger.

Do you see a troubling pattern? I sure do. I hope Alleva learned from both his past HC hire and A&M's current DC hire, but if he simply hires Ensminger at this point, he has established a pattern of bad hires and it demonstrates that LSU's strategy of hiring a local figurehead/caretaker HC and surround him with elite coordinators to win championships will not work. At that point, reasonable people not financially or emotionally connected personally to either Alleva or Orgeron will lose faith and think, we need to make a change.

It's good to think about and clearly articulate these sorts of issues and strategies before they happen so people can fairly decide if LSU is successfully achieving their stated goals. If they're not, then we need to decide, well should we just accept lower goals, or do certain other changes need to be made. Attacking people for pointing all of this out is counterproductive.

I hope the administration - Alleva, the Board of Supervisors, back-room fat cats, etc. - think like this. That's what they're paid to do, not live off the largesse of the program and the fans.

A&M was trying to money whip us. Kudos to LSU for not letting that happen.

Let me use another analogy. Suppose in about 4 years, Saban is slowing down but still hanging on at Alabama. There's some brilliant young OC/HC-in-waiting ("Coach X") that he's personally mentored and is taking on more and more responsibility. It is quietly recognized that Coach X is the real reason for Alabama's current success. Assume further that Coach X is making $3M/yr and Saban is making $10M/yr.

LSU's HC Aranda is now looking for a new OC because O has retired and Aranda is trying to fulfill LSU's unkept promise of getting the best OC money can buy. HC Aranda (so brilliant he even is co-AD) decides that there are 6 elite OCs that I want. Two are in the NFL, three in college, but the best prize of all is Coach X at Alabama.

Aranda considers the situation and says, even though I have a less than 15% chance of pulling away Coach X, I'm going to offer him $6M/yr, but that's my ceiling. No other OC candidate is worth that much, but it is worth it to get Coach X because he is the best and it would cripple Alabama, a team LSU hasn't beaten in 12 years.

Aranda makes his move, negotiating simultaneously with all 6 coordinators who show various levels of interest. He sees an opening with Coach X and it becomes the subject of intense media attention. Alabama, in panic, makes a deal with Coach X who agrees to stay on for $4.5M/yr as OC. Aranda then hires a top-flight ex-NFL OC for $2.5M/yr.

In that scenario, didn't Aranda play that brilliantly? Wouldn't we hope that LSU does something like that rather than simply promote a journeyman position coach?